To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee - Essay Example

2 The Metaphor of the Mocking Bird One of the most interesting quotes is a conversation between Scout, Atticus and Miss Maudie. The quote happens when Scout and her brother are talking about shooting birds with an air rifle: “Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mocking bird” (Lee 103). When Scout questions this, Miss Maudie replies, “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.

That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird” (Lee 103). This quote is central to the story because there are so many “mockingbirds” that are being taken care of around the small town that Scout lives in. In this context, a mockingbird stands for an individual who is innocent but who is destroyed by some type of evil. The first metaphor of a mockingbird that is found is in the character of Boo Radley. He is a sickly boy who no one ever really sees because he moves around in the shadows.

Boo is kind and gentle, he helps Scout and her brother several times and he gives them presents in the tree. Boo is a victim of an abusive father, which makes him an innocent who needs assistance. Another mockingbird is Tom Robinson, the man that Atticus is defending. He was a man minding his own business when Mayella, a white woman asks him to do work. Unfortunately, she tells everyone that he has raped her. Although innocent, he dies because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of the characters, Mr.

Underwood states that killing Tom was like “the senseless slaughter of songbirds by hunters and children … “(Lee 276), and he also believes that “it’s a sin to kill cripples, be they standing, sitting, or escaping” (Lee 276). This statement is important to the story because Mr. Underwood’s statement puts Tom Robinson in the category of a mockingbird because it is also a sin to kill them. The Shmoop Editorial Team states that Tom runs away possibly because it is easier to take his fate into his own hands.

In a way, Scout could also be seen as a mockingbird in the beginning of the story. She is a willfully strong individual and she is innocent to the culture around her. She understands that her are white and black people in the town, but Atticus has taught her that people are people. The challenge for Scout is that she does not see black people differently until her father decides to define Tom Robinson. Rebecca H. Best points out that it is through the people around her that Scout begins to see black people as “the other” which means that they are not the same as whites and therefore should be treated differently.

In her innocence, she is pushed to accept what her father says vs. what the town says about the others in the town. She also finds out from Atticus that the Ewells (the family that Mayella belongs to) are “people but they lived like animals” (Lee 37). Eventually, Scout learns that “people are just people” but she has to go through the process of watching the trial and coming to her own thoughts about the situation. The entire issue of race overshadows the entire story because it is the Deep South before civil rights.

Wendy Leo Moore and Jennifer Pierce refer to Atticus as one of many “white lawyer messiah”